About This Gigapan

Hi, my name is Kelly Scott and I am NOT an alcoholic. I just collect shot glasses.
It began sometime in high school when I decided I wanted to collect something and somehow it ended up being shot glasses. They’re small and cheap and you can find them anywhere you travel. Plus, once people find out you collect them, they all want to buy them for you. Each of them has a story, some more interesting than others, but to me they represent memories of a time, or a place, or even of the people who gave them to me.

My love of travel is reflected in my collection as I have 63 shot glasses from 11 different countries not including the United States. I have been to all but two of the countries (Dominican Republic and Germany) but plan on visiting both someday.

I have been traveling internationally since I was young. When I was 8 years old I went on a mission’s trip with my family to Mexico, at 16 I traveled to Guatemala on my first trip out of the country on my own and at 18 my dream came true when I was able to spend a week in Paris.

Finally it was off to college and all I kept asking when I went visiting schools was “Do you have a study abroad program?” Point Park offered a program to Rome, Italy, and so the traveling continued. I went without knowing a soul (or the language) and had the time of my life. To commemorate my time there, I brought back 10 shot glasses, each from a different city, each with a different memory.

One that I brought back from a weekend in Barcelona, Spain holds a special and humorous memory. My roommates and I immediately loved the city as soon as we got there even though it was the middle of the night and we checked in at a less than attractive hostel that ended up overbooking our room so the three of us had to sleep in one single bed. The main street, Las Ramblas, was packed with people, as it always is, all night long into the early hours of the morning. We spent the weekend eating tapas, drinking sangria, and marveling at Gaudi’s amazing works of art in architecture. However, when it was time to travel back home (Rome), we found out that our flight was booked wrong and they couldn’t rebook it because the computers were down. We had to find our way to Barcelona’s main airport, find the cheapest flight, which ended up being for the next morning, and then sleep in the airport. It was a long night but even though we came back tired and aching, we had a great story to tell and overall an amazing experience in an incredible country. Who can say they just “spent a weekend in Spain?” We can and I brought back a shot glass to prove it.

After that amusing weekend, I continued to travel to more remarkable places that somehow brought with them an increasing number of mishaps. However, my last night in Rome when my bag that contained my passport, money, credit cards, and camera was stolen pretty much takes the cake on most entertaining mishap of all my travels. At least I didn’t lose any shot glasses. That would have been a true catastrophe.

These stories are funny now, not so much then, but I still wouldn’t change anything. I have confidence knowing that I can survive in another country and another culture

The stories behind all the pieces in my collection are endless and I could spend hours talking about them but if there is one thing I’d like to share with people, it is something I found in Barcelona one night at a “travelers bar.” I looked up on the wall and saw the quote &quot;The world is a book and those that don’t travel read only one page.” I later found it was by St. Augustine. From then on it was my favorite quote and I knew that I wanted to keep on reading the pages of the world and I encourage everyone to do the same, whether it is just to another state or across the world, you can learn so much about people, places or even yourself just by finding some place new.

Gigapan Comments
(1)

Kelly, Considering that this is your first
GigaPan, you should be very happy with the
results. I would offer two suggestions: (1) tell
us about the camera you used and the stitching
details, plus (2) please geocode this as it will
then place your curved panorama on a curved
surface in Google Earth, which will then make this
a spectacular GigaPan :)